Tara Rae Moss: ‘So many doctors on different continents told me I would never recover’

Tara Rae Moss no longer takes everyday pleasures for granted. The famous author, speaker and advocate lives for small flashes of beauty. She explores the world in search of small moments of joy. When we meet at the Royal Botanic Gardens on a cloudy Friday in Sydney, silver clouds loom overhead. The humidity has made the plants extraterrestrially green. There is growth everywhere: ferns form a spiral, the lily pilly trees sprout bright pink berries. Moss slips off her shoes.

“I am excited at a toddler level about the feeling of the grass, of being able to walk without pain,” she says. “When I was severely disabled, everything was geographically connected. There were places we had to go by car and I had a crane lift for my wheelchair.”

She seems to enjoy her bare feet on the earth.

“I can now go to places that are a 10-minute walk away. It was a joy to rediscover the interconnectedness of the space,” she says. “It’s hard to put into words how profound it is.”

Eight years ago, after a hip injury, Moss was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome, or CRPS, a rare condition thought to be comparable on the McGill pain scale to childbirth or amputation of a finger. In 2021, she, her husband, the poet Berndt Sellheim, and her daughter Sapphira, sold her inaccessible home in the Blue Mountains and moved to a waterfront cottage in her hometown of Victoria, Canada. The condition spread, she says, after a ketamine infusion in 2021.

“I was stuck in the biological way of thinking about my illness and pain,” she says. “So many doctors in different countries and continents told me I would never recover. I was split down the middle like a ruler and half my body was on fire, cold fire.

She was housebound. Her work dried up. “I started to lose the use of my right arm. I already couldn’t use my right leg. I really had no choice but to venture further into the unknown.”

To research her novels, Moss once trained as a private investigator and obtained her race car license—a level of physical immersion in her characters that was no longer possible. How has CRPS changed her writing? “It changed everything, on all levels of my being,” she says honestly.

Moss, who will speak Our Bodies, a panel at the Sydney Opera House’s All About Women festival, is now called Rae or Tara Rae. The reclamation of the name she was born with reflects a newfound acceptance of herself as she is, while simultaneously honoring all the ways in which she is no longer the same person.

Her best-selling mystery novels – which she started writing at the age of 25 after an international career as a model – are often set in the past. Growing up, she was fascinated by how ordinary people could find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

“My grandfather was taken for slave labor during the occupation of Poland. He baked bread to bribe the foreman (for) a day pass to leave the site,” she said. “My grandmother, who had young children, would cycle to Berlin and smuggle flour and sugar through the checkpoints.”

Moss’s books are governed by strong and vulnerable women who often negotiate a world shaped by structures stacked against them. In the case of her two most recent novels, The War Widow and The Ghosts of Paris, this is Billie Walker, a private detective navigating a patriarchal Sydney in the aftermath of World War II. In The War Widow, Billie wears “an ivory blouse (tied) with a bow at her throat”. Her clothing descriptions – always wonderful to read – demonstrate a deep awareness of the relationship between interior and exterior. How we can get caught up in the roles that society prescribes to us, or completely recreate them.

“The idea that women have no authority is many centuries old,” says Moss, who famously grappled with female archetypes in her nonfiction bestseller The Fictional Woman.

We walk past lemon myrtle trees towards Sydney Harbour. Moss reflects on the time before the invasion of Poland, an era, she says, when disabled people were murdered by the Nazi regime and considered unfit for society. “I can’t write about the 1940s without exploring human rights issues (for people with disabilities) because it wasn’t just about war – there was a strong ableist component to it.”

Near the lotus pond sits an ibis, with its legs bent at a strange angle, with an expression of sadness. Moss comes closer. She talks to the bird and asks about its well-being. Her voice is soft and soothing. She doesn’t want to repress it and therefore reluctantly steps away.

To avoid the joggers, she suggests we sit on the grass. According to her, CRPS is more common in women. The diagnosis itself is a privilege. “We know that in women, pain is taken less seriously,” she says. She talks about the Flexner Report, the 1911 study that transformed medical education and established the primacy of the biomedical model of medicine. It undermined, at least in the West, healing traditions based on the connection between body and mind and the world around us.

At the beginning of our walk, Moss is entranced by an insect entangled in a spider’s web and held up by threads, like gossamer. In September 2023, doctors at The Spero Clinic, an acclaimed treatment center, confirmed that her CRPS was in remission.

“In pain circles we have arrived at the bio-psycho-social model (of healing),” she says. “For a long time, someone broke an ankle, you reset the ankle. Then people realized that there was a psychological element (pain) and that social injustice affects how we experience the world.

“For me, the extra leap that was made was towards the spiritual.”

She went through a radical change. She stopped taking her medications. “By the time I reached the clinic, I was back upright with my walker. A big part of that (recovery) is the spiritual work that I have now been trained in.”

Moss, who makes it clear that she is not a shaman (a title given by communities), has studied for several years to become a shamanic practitioner. She says she resonates most with cultural and spiritual rituals that were part of her own ancestral Northern European lineage, coupled with an awareness of the land she finds herself in.

“I work with helping spirits and people report incredible healing experiences,” she says, arguing that despite the hostility sometimes expressed toward alternative forms of spirituality, direct experience of the spiritual is our birthright.

We get up and walk back through the gardens, briefly wondering how the ibis is doing.

“Our worlds are much richer when we connect with everything around us,” she smiles. “We are spiritual beings having human experiences, not humans having spiritual experiences. It is much more interesting than we think.”